How to Heat a Tent Safely While Camping

A good sleep at night is an essential part of camping or hiking to have you mind and body function properly the next day. In order to get a good night sleep, warm tent plays a vital role in winter season. Whether it is a family cabin tent or medium two person tent, you need to know how to heat the tent safely to have a perfect camping.

Winter cannot stop those people who are passionate about camping, but to make your tent warm you need to follow some rules. You should also keep in mind that tent is an isolated place; therefore you should always take some safety measures, some precautions before following any method of heating a tent.

You should always be careful while lighting-up anything inside the tent or even toughing any hot substance.

How to Heat a Tent

There are a lot of methods you can use to heat your tent if you are camping with family. Out of those you need to choose which one is appropriate or what essentials do you have around to start the method.

Here I will be talking about some methods of heating your tent safely, hope these will be helpful for you:

Use a Propane Heater

To use this method you need a propane tank and a propane heater. Many people are concern that a propane heater will release carbon monoxide inside the tent which is very harmful and risky, but research shows that if you use it properly this type of heater can make your tent warm without any risk.

To use it in a proper way, put the propane tank outside the tent and put the heater inside the tent close to the tent closure. Connect the heater and the tank with a hose pipe. After connecting the pipe with the tank put the hose pipe inside though the tent and connect the other head of the pipe to the heater. Using smaller heater is enough, which can get along in your lightweight backpack.

You should prevent any possibility of leakage make sure to seal the pipe firmly tight. Also keep the tent closure a bit open for ventilation. To use it safely put the tank pressure low to medium power. You can also but the heater onto a woolen blanket, this will help to keep the surface warm. As a safety measure you can carry a carbon monoxide detector. This will detect if any carbon monoxide is released as a byproduct of the propane heater burning.

How to Heat a Tent with a Candle

Use candle lanterns: you can use any kind of candle lantern, any regular one like tea light candle lantern. If the lantern is small then you can use to lanterns. Put the lanterns inside your tent. These will produce heat inside your tent.

For safety use can put the lanterns inside buckets made of tin or you can even use cans.

To make your tent warm with this method you need to light-up the candles 2/4 hours before sleeping. This method is very safe but many people are not comfortable sleeping with lighted candles inside the tent.

Therefore, if you light-up the candle 3-4 hours before going to bed, you can warm up your room and turn it off before sleeping.

Suitable Sleeping Bag

There are several type sleeping bags or hammock tents for different temperatures in the market. For using in the tent, you should use sleeping bags. Good quality sleeping bags are expensive but those are worth buying. Good quality sleeping bags can really keep you warm inside your ten.

Before buying a sleeping bag research on the weather of your campsite, this will help you to pick the best sleeping bag for your tour. Do not forget to buy a sleeping bag which covers your head, coving your head and ear can really help you to keep warm.

Use liners

To make yourself warn you can use two liners with your sleeping bag. One is a sleeping bag liner and the other one is a fleece liner. Use a zero degree sleeping bag to protect yourself from cold, put it inside a lightweight sleeping bag liner. This sleeping bag liner will work as a frost catcher.

As the liner gets wet and not the bag, therefore the bag stays warm. Also use a fleece liner underneath the sleeping bag to keep yourself warm. For sleeping you can use a closed cell foam pad with reflective material on one side which will reflect some heat back towards your sleeping bag. On top of the cell foam pad layer up with an inflated pad, this will keep you a little further off the ground.

Homemade Heater: make your own tent heater

For this you need a military style wood stove, charcoal or wood logs, a hollow sheet metal box, a flange for a dryer, a little 12-volt fan, a cycle battery and a pulse width modulation controller.

1^st put the stove outside of the tent and put the sheet metal box on top of the stove. Now attach a flange for the dryer onto the duct and install the duct into the metal box.

Set the 12-volt fan on the other end of the duct and then run the duct through your tent. To control the speed of the fan add the modulation controller with a cycle battery. The advantage of this modulation controller is that it significantly uses less energy in the speed control feature.

You can adjust the speed based on the temperature of your stove; also, you can control the air flow going inside your tent with it. To light-up your stove you can use charcoal or wood logs, but I guess charcoal is the better option between these two. This method is very effective and you can easily make your tent warm for hours with the help of this method.

Use Heated Rocks to Heat a Tent

If you do not want to carry extra gears or somehow you missed caring gears for heating your tent, then this method is perfect for you. To peruse this method you do not need any skill. You just need to collect a big rock, if not found then small rocks.

Campfires do not need to be running all night to keep you warm in a tent. Place the big rock or small rocks on the campfire for a few hours. After 4 or 5 hours take out the rocks from the fire and leave it aside to let it cool a bit so that it is safe to handle.

After cooling a bit, take a towel or a piece of cloth and wrap the rock in a way that the cloth covers the rock/rocks properly. Then take the cloth inside your tent.

This way, the stone/stones will release the heat all around the tent, and you will be able to stay warm all night.